Complexity of era defined Irish neutrality in war

OPINION:Minister's comments on Irish position reflect his own preferences and belie intricacy of period

DURING THE second World War, novelist Elizabeth Bowen travelled between Britain and Ireland and provided reports on Irish attitudes to neutrality and the British war effort to the dominions office and the ministry of information in London.

In November 1940, she offered the following assessment: “It may be felt in England that Éire is making a fetish of her neutrality. But this assertion of her neutrality is Éire’s first free self-assertion: as such alone it would mean a great deal to her. Éire (and I think rightly) sees her neutrality as positive, not merely negative.”

This depiction of Irish neutrality, as seen through contemporary eyes, is clearly not shared by Minister for Justice and Defence Alan Shatter, who has chosen recently to present it primarily as “a principle of moral bankruptcy” in the context of the Holocaust.

In doing so, he has underlined the dangers of reading history backwards, which has also been a feature of some of the commentary on the controversy over the actions of the 5,000 members of the Irish Army who deserted to fight with the Allies.

Both of these issues have raised a question that arose in 2005 at the time of the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, when some demanded that president Mary McAleese apologise for de Valera’s visit to the German ambassador, Edouard Hempel, to express condolences on behalf of the Irish people following the suicide of Hitler.

Such a demand posed a dilemma, now repeating itself: should contemporary politicians have to apologise for the perceived sins of their political ancestors, or is it the case that those passing judgment are simplifying the past to satisfy present-day political sensibilities or to pursue their contemporary political agendas?

The danger of framing these issues as morally black or white is that such an approach presents an analysis of historical events and experiences that is unhistorical and devoid of nuance or context. Defining Irish attitudes to the war and its attendant horrors is not well served by simplifying and distorting them into simple choices.

The complexities of the political and social attitudes of that era, wonderfully described by Clair Wills in her 2007 book That Neutral Island,were manifold. The difficulty of defining loyalty in Ireland in the 1940s, particularly during periods when invasion was a distinct possibility and when a genuine fear existed that Britain might seek to undo the Irish independence so far achieved, was compounded by many factors.

While there is little doubt that neutrality involved self-interest and managing apparent contradictions – de Valera mixed his public stubbornness with an informal pragmatism in relation to assisting the Allies – there was

the wider question of what neutrality represented at that stage in the State’s existence and the extent to which it marked the successful culmination of a foreign policy process of the 1920s and 1930s to maximise sovereignty.

It was something around which there was a high degree of political consensus in a State that was seeking to cement independence in the shadow of the devastating divisions of the early 1920s that had led to civil war. To maintain neutrality in the face of British and, after it entered the war, US opposition, took nerve and it represented a significant achievement, as well as generating pride in an infant state. This was later reflected in the positive public reaction to de Valera’s dignified response to Winston Churchill’s intemperate attack on Irish neutrality during his victory speech in May 1945.

While Shatter’s speech acknowledged briefly the concern for stability and protecting the achievement of independence, he was selective in the evidence he presented to justify the claim of moral bankruptcy. He cites the opposition of Charles Bewley, the pro-Nazi Irish ambassador in Berlin to the State accepting Jewish refugees, while failing to acknowledge Bewley was not representative of Irish diplomatic, political or public opinion; he was sidelined and unpopular with colleagues in the department of external affairs.

His attempt to reorientate Irish policy towards Germany according to his own preferences led to a falling out with Joseph Walshe, secretary of the department. In 2006, Cormac Ó Gráda pointed out in his book Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: "Irish anti- Semitism existed and traces doubtless still persist, but it was of a relatively mild variety."

Shatter’s pronouncements also underestimate contemporary confusion, uncertainties, scepticism about perceived propaganda, the influence of censorship and lack of access to concrete information.

As Clair Wills has observed: “the crucial factor which lamed the humanitarian response was the inability to contemplate, let alone comprehend, the true meaning and scale of the Jewish persecution until it was far too late . . . a reporting of the war denuded of all commentary, stripped of all specific reference to atrocity, produced its own kind of falsehood.”

Those who deserted from the Irish Army – and they deserted for reasons not just to do with opposition to Nazism – were dealt with harshly, and given the social and economic difficulties subsequently experienced by the deserters and their families, it can be convincingly argued that the price paid by them was unbearably high.

The case made by the Irish Soldiers Pardons Campaign is that a military tribunal rather than the government should have dealt with deserters, but they have also accepted unequivocally that desertion was and is a serious offence. Again, it can be seen that the issue was not and is not black or white.

The attempts by Shatter to paint Irish neutrality as dishonourable and amoral also conveniently overlook the wider cost of neutrality: it further entrenched partition, damaged relations with Britain and the US, and, as much of Europe rebuilt and prospered in the 1950s under the aegis of reconstruction, the Irish economy floundered and emigration soared. Such was partly the price of the State’s “first free self-assertion”.

Most disappointingly, the latter part of Shatter’s recent speech reveals his true agenda. He conveniently, due to his own preferences, insists that what he regards as the tarnished legacy of neutrality “delimits Ireland’s moral authority” to be critical of contemporary Israel.

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD